Of JOHN HEYWOOD, the favourite jester of Henry the Eighth and his daughter Mary, and the intimate of Sir Thomas More, whose congenial humour may have mingled with his own, more table-talk and promptness at reply have been handed down to us than of any writer of the times. His quips, and quirks, and quibbles are of his age, but his copious pleasantry still enlivens; these smoothed the brow of Henry, and relaxed the rigid muscles of the melancholy Mary. He had the _entrée_ at all times to the privy-chamber, and often to administer a strong dose of himself, which her majesty's physicians would prescribe. He is distinguished as Heywood the epigrammatist; a title fairly won by the man who has left six centuries of epigrams, collected and adjusted as many English proverbs in his verse, besides the quaint conceits of "crossing of proverbs."[2] Of these six hundred epigrams it is possible not a single one is epigrammatic: we have never had a Martial. Even when it became a fashion, to write books of epigrams half a century subsequently, they usually closed in a miserable quibble, a dull apophthegm, or at the best, like those of Sir John Harrington, in a plain story rhymed. Wit, in our sense of the term, was long unpractised, and the modern epigram was not yet discovered. Heywood, who had flourished under Henry, on the change in the reign of Edward, clung to the ancient customs. He was a Romanist, but had he not recovered in some degree from the cecity of superstition, he had not so keenly exposed, as he has done, some vulgar impostures. It happened, however, that some unlucky jest, trenching on treason, flew from the lips of the unguarded jester; it would have hanged some--but pleasant verses promptly addressed to the young sovereign saved him at the pinch,--however, he gathered from "the council" that this was no jesting-time, and he left the country in the day that Bale was returning from his emigration under King Henry. On Mary's accession, Bale again retired, and Heywood suddenly appeared at court. Asked by the queen "What wind blew him there?" "Two specially; the one to see your majesty!" he replied. "We thank you for that," said the queen, "but I pray you what is the other?" "That your grace might see me!" There was shrewdness in this pleasantry, to bespeak the favour of his royal patroness. Four short years did not elapse ere Elizabeth opened her long reign, and then the merry Romanist for ever bid farewell to his native land, while Bale finally sat beside his English hearth. These were very moveable and removeable times, and no one was certain how long he should remain in his now locality.